City of Zombies is a co-operative, dice-allocating game where players are trying to stop wave after wave of zombies from attacking the city.

This is a Kickstarter project that is live at the moment. The game was designed by Matt Tidbury to help his daughter with her arithmetic and, since then, Matt has had a great deal of excellent and positive feedback from the many schools where he has tested it with kids, as well as adult education centres and even a prison too.

Whilst the game is intended to help kids with their number skills, it offers a fun game challenge too. Players take turns rolling 3 dice and they can then allocate them to zombies which each have a target number on them in order to destroy them. The tricky part is that to kill a zombie, a player must use the values of the dice to match the target number on each zombie AND no dice can be left unused. So, if you roll a 2, 4 and 5, you could add these all together to make 11 and kill one zombie with value 11, or multiply the 2 and 4 to make 8 and kill one zombie with value 8 and another zombie with value 5, etc. Remember, every dice must be used in some way or no zombies can be removed by that player. After each player has had a turn, the zombies advance towards the city and more zombies arrive at the top of the board.

I played the game with 4 experienced adult gamers (all good at maths) and it was interesting to see how everyone was trying to come up with the better combinations than other players. You may need to live in the UK to get this reference, but it’s basically a zombie version of the numbers round in Channel 4’s Countdown. The artwork is great and the zombies also come in two styles too which you can see in this image.

I’ve actually been directly involved in this project a small amount recently, through a mutual friend, which has been a lot of fun. I’ve been helping add some extra game play depth and variety, plus I’ve been creating a set of advanced rules which can be added in different mixtures to add various effects that get triggered during the game (which add a lot more difficulty) and the need for some tactics.

The project is live already with a couple of weeks to go. You can find more info and artwork in the Kickstarter page by following this link: bga.me/zombies

James.

(Note that whilst I am involved in helping with some of the game design on this project, I receive absolutely no financial gain from it.)